When I launched tshirtreviewblog.com at the beginning of the year, there have been a number of little things I’ve been meaning to do since then. I spoke a bit about “get it out there and tweak it” in this blog’s first post, and I’m finally putting that into practice.

The last week or so has kept me pretty busy solidifying tshirtreviewblog.com in a few different ways. I have quite a bit more to go between now and this weekend (my arbitrary deadline) but things are coming along alright. Many changes are behind the scenes, but it’s worth a look nevertheless.

One important thing I’ve noticed though is that I’m finding is my groove. It’s my procedure every day; the things I have to go through to generate the best content I can and make sure I’m in the loop on everything. I’ve got to see what’s new, I’ve got to see what others are writing about. I’m an obsessive stats checker, so that’s of course part of the routine. I need to find out where my traffic’s coming from, why some things are getting a larger response than others, etc.

A lot of this is old news I’m sure to those of you that are veterans, but it’s new to me. The biggest thing I can suggest to anyone in my position though is to read. Nothing helps me stay in the right frame of mind and make correct decisions more than absorbing as much outside information as possible. Read everything you can on your given topic, but read completely unrelated sites and blogs as well. Finding someone’s archives, and determining how they’ve developed their “voice” and their outlook over time has been particularly helpful.

I find that once housekeeping tasks are out of the way (checking servers, email, stats and traffic, checking for comments, etc.) that my time breaks down to something like 70% reading and 30% writing, roughly. This may of course change over time, but that seems to be where I’m at right now. Does anyone have any similar experiences?

Well this weekend certainly seemed to fly by, is it Monday already? Lunch with Microsoft on Thursday was pretty good. It wasn’t the best steak I’d ever had, but I certainly can’t complain, it was a wonderful experience. I had the chance to learn a lot about their unified communications tools and licensing, two things I’ve been out of the loop on for a while now.

I do know that Cisco has an amazing unified communication/PBX type system as well. While I have an extensive Microsoft background, I also trained with the Cisco Academy for two years. I learned everything I would need to attain CCNA certification, but never actually took the test. Don’t ask me any questions about spanning tree protocol, I don’t remember.

In any event, I spent the better part of the weekend catching up on some much-needed housecleaning and running some errands. I fell quite a bit behind being sick in bed the first week of the year. Things are finally back to normal on the home front, and that feels good.

I have read on various blogs where people have trouble trying to work on a side business while also holding down a full-time job. I have to admit I can certainly feel where they are coming from. It’s indeed a challenge, not just fighting for the time, but also for the motivation. There are a lot of nights where I come home and I’m looking forward to unwinding, maybe playing a little guitar or something. I look at a computer screen all day, some days it’s just not that appealing to do the same when I get home.

That being said of course, I do find at least a part of every day where I get charged about the next step for BKE. I’m a procrastinator though, and I do need to work on my execution. You can plan forever, and sometimes you just have to pull the trigger.

Happy new year! Hopefully everybody had a restful Christmas season and safe new year’s celebrations. I’ve been off work since the Friday before xmas, and have been fortunate to have the opportunity to spend a lot of time with family and friends. I think this time of year brings the opportunity to examine your work-life balance and set goals to improve it over the next year.

With all the free time, it was awfully tempting to sit in front of the computer for hours on end working on various BKE projects, but what opportunities would I have lost with family doing that? I think I made the right decision to completely abstain from the computer for a little while.

I’ll admit, I couldn’t resist checking in from time to time, but I’ve got quite a bit of feed reading and whatnot to catch up on now. I’ve had the opportunity to rediscover some things that get neglected when you spend all day on the computer (including Seinfeld seasons 8 and 9) and other offline activities that I can share with family and friends.

How do you balance time working on your projects and business ventures with home and family life?